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Bryn Pickering

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Nov 9, 2016, 7:21:58 PM11/9/16
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Hi all,

It was discussed briefly at the end of the Milan workshop that we could do with an alternative method for discussing the outcomes of the workshop breakout groups and for collaboration between institutes generally. At the moment we have a few ways of sharing and discussing information: this mailing list, the wiki, and google documents scattered around. They don't quite cover the early stage, more dynamic discussions nor the engaging discussions required to keep people interested in completing tasks like documentation from workshop breakout groups.

I've had a look through what's available online for this and have detailed the problem and possible solutions here. Slack is the favourite out there at the moment, but its free version only keeps the most recent 10,000 chat messages, so could quickly become a way in which information is easily lost. Thankfully, lots of others are trying to get a slice of the action. Of those out there at the moment, these are the ones I think have the most potential:
  • Slack (although limited by the message limit, it is still loved by many)
  • Ryver (seems to be a clone of Slack without the limitations, not sure yet what the snag is)
  • Mattermost (open source version of the platforms, but requires dedicated installation on your device or for someone to host a version of it on their own servers)
  • Rocket.chat (similar to mattermost, being open-source and requiring dedicated installation. Also adds video conferencing and possibility of embedding chat functions into pages on the openmod website, like a helpdesk style thing)

I'd welcome any comments, particularly from those who've tried out any of the above (or similar). If you'd like to either test out some and/or take the discussion away from the mailing list then I have created openmod.slack.com and openmod.ryver.com for the time being.


If we agree on one then we'll begin by using it to wrap up breakout groups from the last workshop and to start organising the next one. I imagine it won't change the frequency of posts you see on this mailing list, there just might end up being more background chatter on the topic before/after they are sent out.


Best,

Bryn

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Tim Tröndle

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Nov 10, 2016, 6:08:56 AM11/10/16
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Bryn, all,

Thanks a lot for the comprehensive overview. Having used only Slack before I would like to add the following thoughts: 

Ryver seems to be a very young service and they aim at having a functioning business model by adding the task management in the future. They wouldn’t be the first to find out they promised too much and to start limiting their free service eventually; wakari.io’s hosted Jupyter notebooks are an example.

Similar things could be said about Mattermost: the company behind it tries to sell support and add ‘creative pricing for large enterprises’. But the fact that it’s open source makes it a more sustainable solution. Obviously it comes at the price of someone needing to host it. But I’d like to add a thought on that: a Mattermost instance can include more than one team. So in case some institution on this list would be interested in using Mattermost internally, the administration effort could be reduced by using the same instance. That goes even further as GitLab seems to ship with Mattermost, reducing the administration effort even more.

Best
Tim

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Fadi Bitar

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Nov 10, 2016, 7:07:43 AM11/10/16
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Hey Bryn,

Thanks for the overview!
As someone that's worked with Slack in two different corporate settings, I can say that fact that slack only indexes the 10.000 most recent message has so far never been a problem, 10.000 is a large enough number to keep all relevant messages available for as long as you would need them.
I think it would be a good approach if we look at Slack as a discussion platform and make sure knowledge condensation makes it to the wiki, given that Slack (or a similar service) is in any case not very well-suited to be a knowledge repository, but rather a channel to exchange quick thoughts and ideas.

My two cents.

/Fadi

Robbie Morrison

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Nov 10, 2016, 7:44:34 AM11/10/16
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Hello Bryn, all

Your posting and google docs summary present an interesting proposal. My underpinning principles are:

  • an organization should not develop information systems than it cannot comfortably use and maintain — some vehicles (like email lists) are naturally self-maintaining while others (like websites) require active and ongoing input
  • open source applications should be used ahead of proprietary applications
  • web-based solutions have distinct advantages
  • cloud-based solutions can have disadvantages (as the FSFE says: there is no cloud, just other people's computers)

Groupware

I have long been interested in groupware but never managed to convince colleagues to use it. So I have no direct experience.

Interestingly, only Slack, Samepage, Glip, and Zulip get coverage on Wikipedia, Ryver, Mattermost, Fleep, and Riot do not get a mention and Rocket.chat and Bitrix gain only trivial references. The Wikipedia list of collaborative software is worth a visit.

I also looked at Kolab, one which I have seen promoted, but it seems more suited to relationship management.

I personally would require any groupware application to be completely independent of my mail client (aside from receiving notifications). I don't know how your suggestions stack up in this regard.

openmod-initiative list

I personally would like to see more traffic on the email list. Threaded views can help organize the postings and overcome one of your suggested limitations (Gmail offers a conversation view, for Thunderbird, filter openmod emails into a local folder and then set View > Sort by > Threaded).

I would strongly prefer the openmod-initiative list archive to be open, referenceable by URL, and indexed by search engines. I am used to GNU projects where this is the case. An open status allows, for example, individual postings to be cited as sources on Wikipedia and elsewhere, to be cross-posted without ambiguity, and to be shared with outsiders. Maybe this is not wanted by some?

Indeed, there would be a case for making the email list open and the groupware closed, particularly as the less resolved discussions would then migrate to the groupware platform? Personally I would prefer the discussion platform to be open too.

Openmod wiki

While I am reluctant to suggest a change, I prefer wikis based on the MediaWiki platform (as used by Wikipedia). The markup is more sophisticated and the software is unlikely to become stranded. I wonder whether a more feature-rich wiki might not fill the need for dedicated groupware. Wikipedia seems to get along just fine having (sometimes lengthy) discussions on its talk pages. The presence of a commit log can occasionally be very useful too. Moreover the generated content does not need reprocessing to become part of the (public) wiki.

Just some comments. Hope these help. Thanks for your suggestions and work, Bryn. Robbie.

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Bart Wiegmans

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Nov 10, 2016, 9:21:02 AM11/10/16
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Hi,

Coming from what Robbie said, can I suggest 'just' using IRC?
It has web clients (for instance Kiwi IRC), there are many open source server implementations; if necessary, you can just squat on freenode for the time being. (In fact, that has a distinct advantage in that many things are already on freenode).
It has much more tool support than any other network.
For the quick exchange of ideas, I think an IRC channel would be ideal. Many open source projects use it.

Regards,
Bart




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m.do...@mytum.de

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Nov 15, 2016, 4:20:17 AM11/15/16
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Hello,

I like the idea of IRC and also of open source platforms. From other communities I follow, I heard about Discourse. I have not tested it yet, but it may have the advantage of including the google group and the chat discussion in one place. Has anyone used it yet?

Regards
Magdalena
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Robbie Morrison

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Nov 15, 2016, 8:17:36 AM11/15/16
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Hello Magdalena, all

Wikipedia has a page on Discourse too. The software is used by Open Knowledge International and I had a look — not much to report there though.

Some features of Discourse that I liked (in no particular order):

  • looks well resolved
  • accepts Markdown and HTML (together) for rich-formatting (and probably a distinct improvement on HTML-based composition in Thunderbird)
  • has a revision history
  • supports so-called "wiki posts" —one can mark a post as collaboratively editable by trusted members
  • community-based moderation and administration to share the admin load
  • structured backup policy
  • GPL'ed (notwithstanding, Discourse is venture capital funded)
  • co-created by well-regarded Stack Overflow software Q+A site co-founder Jeff Attwood

I read a few reviews — the following points arose:

  • the software is designed to help posters self-moderate
  • default discussion license is Creative Commons
  • browsers before Internet Explorer 10 (released September 2012) are not supported (unlikely to be a problem)
  • works well on mobile devices
  • rather than a large hierarchy of forums and sub-forums, Discourse uses categories (like Stack Overflow) that feel a bit like tags
  • just like many other forum systems, Discourse offers a user profile page
  • it combines a mailing list, a discussion forum, and a long-form (whatever that is) chat room
  • the website at discourse.org is very much set up to push you towards hosting with them — as of 2014, plans starts at $200 per month, apparently

Some policy issues for the list:

  • should our mailing list be read-only open and write-only by registration (my preference) — indeed with a discussion forum the mailing list will probably become a low-traffic "announce" list
  • should the discussion forum be read-only open and write-only by registration — actually the control can be fine tuned with public and private categories set on a case-by-case basis so this is not an issue — for instance, workshop organization can be limited to registered uses (account holders) while question and answer boards can remain in public view or even writable without a prior account
  • what is our position on and strategy for archiving — archiving is good process and our traffic may even be useful to researchers in the future
  • Discourse supports anonymous posting — do we want to enable that? (on first take, I think not)
  • integration with social media is possible but not required (noting that, as of June 2016, OSeMOSYS uses facebook for their discussions, why?)

And importantly:

  • should we pay for hosting somewhere
  • can an established institution provide space and maintenance
  • or some other solution

Of all the forum suggestions so far, this platform appeals to me most.

Finally, I note that our Stack Exchange proposal lapsed through inaction.

best wishes, Robbie

PS: Things have certainly come along way from the dial-up bulletin boards, Usenet, the web before graphics, and gopher that I have previously used. :)

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Berit Mueller

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Nov 15, 2016, 9:06:07 AM11/15/16
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Thanks Robbie for the detailed analysis.  I’m not at all in the subject of software for discussion platforms but I’m happy about the discussion because I really see the need for it. There are various discussion lines as follow up of the break-out-groups where I don’t know how to organize them in a  way that people can follow or recap…

 

If possible I would really prefer to have a solution without regular direct costs. First: we don’t have regular budgets; second: If we try to find budgets for administration then a lot of people who already do it for the openmod community for free should be considered, too – and I think it will be difficult to afford it.  

I just want to pronounce: That doesn’t mean I’m against fundraising! I also try to get projects where I can address tasks that we wanted to foster on the openmod platform. Then it is dedicated to special tasks (and unfortunately time limited);

If there is a chance to get unlimited funding that’s another thing. Otherwise I prefer to discuss in the community who will be able to take over some work instead of being forced to find a certain amount of funding for regular expenditures which go to people outside the community.

 

Did anybody following this discussion made up a comparing list? If not I can start to do that but not before end of the week.

 

Best

Berit

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Dorfner, Johannes

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Nov 15, 2016, 9:31:21 AM11/15/16
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Hi all,

 

yet another solution, which would semantically be linked closer to openmod’s GitHub account [1] , is Gitter [2]. While it is more advertised towards software projects, (cf. example Julia’s usage [3] of Gitter), its conversations are publically available, and I’m not aware of any limit. For urbs, I set up a very very low traffic channel [5] for open discussion independent of issues and pull requests.

Bonus points for Techies: the chat rooms have a (beta, but working fine for me) IRC bridge [4] for easy access from your favourite chat client.

 

Not a comparison table, but a list of all proposed platforms I heard so far in this discussion (sorted alphabetically):

 

-          Bitrix

-          Fleep

-          Gitter

-          Glip

-          IRC

-          Mattermost

-          Riot

-          Rocket.chat

-          Ryver

-          Samepage

-          Slack

-          Zulip

 

Best regards

Johannes

 

 

 

[1] https://github.com/openmod-initiative

[2] http://gitter.im

[3] https://gitter.im/JuliaLang/julia

[4] https://irc.gitter.im/

[5] https://gitter.im/tum-ens/urbs

Robbie Morrison

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Nov 15, 2016, 10:13:15 AM11/15/16
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Hello Johannes, Berit, Magdalena, all

The high level choice seems to be between a chat service (including IRC) and a web forum. The earlier suggestion of collaboration software (or groupware) seems to have receded somewhat?

I have not used chat (I only know of the chat logs between Chelsea Manning and Adrian Lamo) and cannot really comment. Perhaps chat focuses more on the conversation and less on the content. If so, I lean towards the latter.

best wishes, Robbie

On 11/15/2016 03:31 PM, Dorfner, Johannes wrote:

Hi all,

 

yet another solution, which would semantically be linked closer to openmod’s GitHub account [1] , is Gitter [2]. While it is more advertised towards software projects, (cf. example Julia’s usage [3] of Gitter), its conversations are publically available, and I’m not aware of any limit. For urbs, I set up a very very low traffic channel [5] for open discussion independent of issues and pull requests.

Bonus points for Techies: the chat rooms have a (beta, but working fine for me) IRC bridge [4] for easy access from your favourite chat client.

 

Not a comparison table, but a list of all proposed platforms I heard so far in this discussion (sorted alphabetically):

 

-          Bitrix

- Discourse

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Bryn Pickering

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Nov 16, 2016, 7:25:25 AM11/16/16
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Thanks for the input everyone! I'll extend the google doc I was working on here to include all your suggestions and the pros/cons of them. I've also made it openly editable so people can add further to it and vote on the list of possibilities. When it has settled down sufficiently I'll probably put something on the wiki to archive the decision process.

Of the newly suggested, I quite like the sound of Gitter (although gitter.im/openmod isn't available :( ). I agree that IRC also has potential. I'm guessing that with some work we could probably host an IRC client that would fit openmod, but I don't think current clients are quite suitable for us. E.g. creating a community within which parallel conversations could be easily navigable isn't something Kiwi/freenode provides.

The high level question is probably not quite chat vs forum, as they provide different functions. I'd say that our current forum Google groups is already providing us with a forum that is useful for certain types of discussions, and particularly useful for its mailing list capacity (notifying the openmod community). Having chat for conversation that forms content is something I think we're missing and its existence could move forward things like the wiki as well as fostering more of a community by allowing conversation on more "banal" topics that people might not feel fits into the forum (or at least the forum as it currently stands).

Granted, chat functionality may not be well received, no matter how good the intention. We could pick the most feature-rich/relevant chat platform, but it is useless if we only have a handful of active members using it. Although Slack has many disadvantages, it certainly has managed to draw in the critical mass to make it work for many groups. As such, I'd suggest picking a platform for the near-term, one which we can quickly start using to wrap up the last openmod workshop before everyone forgets it. If it looks like chat works for us, then we can spend more time on a long-term solution.

The reason I'm suggesting it that way is because many of the preferred solutions would work best if we could find somewhere to host the platforms. Given that we have many institutes actively involved in openmod, it's probably something that would be viable, but it will take time (and perhaps money) - something that might prove fruitless if nobody ends up using it...

Bryn

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Robbie Morrison

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Nov 16, 2016, 8:24:48 AM11/16/16
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Hello Bryn, Johannes, Berit, Magdalena, all

Bryn wrote:

"Having chat for conversation that forms content is something I think we're missing and its existence could move forward things like the wiki as well as fostering more of a community by allowing conversation on more "banal" topics that people might not feel fits into the forum (or at least the forum as it currently stands)."

My experience as part of the GLPK open source solver community did something like this. Threads from traffic on the mailing list were distilled out and edited into a Wikibook on the software by three or so active participants. This was admittedly an exercise in software support and software documentation, but perhaps the underlying process could be used here given suitable chat or forum traffic and sufficient interest from our community?

best wishes, Robbie

On 11/16/2016 01:25 PM, Bryn Pickering wrote:
Thanks for the input everyone! I'll extend the google doc I was working on here to include all your suggestions and the pros/cons ofthem. I've also made it openly editable so people can add further to it and vote on the list of possibilities. When it has settled down sufficiently I'll probably put something on the wiki to archive the decision process.
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Ingmar Schlecht

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Nov 18, 2016, 3:02:42 AM11/18/16
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Hi everyone,

very interesting discussion; great you guys raised it.

When it comes to open community's communication platforms, I have a few guiding principles:

  • Lets try not to scatter communication too much.
    Having different means of communication can easily lead to sub groups only communicating on specific platforms and not noticing what's going on in the other channels. That is especially risky with different technical platforms in my experience (say, Slack vs. mailing lists) and not so much with multiple channels within the same technology (i.e. having more than one mailing list, but both residing on the same server), because people usually know where they can find "neighbouring groups" if communicated well and there is no entry barriers as there would be with different platforms which need separate log in credentials.

  • Try to avoid commercial and especially closed platforms,
    firstly because of the risk of the service provider closing down and secondly because if things are closed behind login walls, the internet doesn't get to see the content, which limits the value of the information created in the process.

Side note: The fact that we're using a Google group mailing list here already of course violates the second principle. As I stated in my very first mail to this list after I creating it in Oktober 2014, I would actually prefer a Mailman based mailing list but chose for Google groups for the ease of setting it up and maintaining it. Given that we all hvae the email messages to the list in our local folders, I think we also have some sort of distributed backup of the content, should Google decide to discontinue the service.

As for the solutions which have been proposed so far:

  • I am strongly against Slack due to its closedness. Messages posted there cannot be found from outside and the free version even looses content after a while when the message limit is reached. To me, that is absolutely no option for an open community, despite all the benefits it offers.
  • Discourse looks like a nice and modern forum to me and I know many open source communities using it (thanks to Robbie for pointing out the benefits, especially the wiki style postings seem useful). However, I'm not sure its benefits over the Google group we're using now justify the work and cost needed for setting it up. Keeping both this Google group mailing list and a Discourse forum running in parallel in my opinion scatters platforms more than necessary. If we need specific discussion places for certain subjects (i.e. for more informal and high-traffic email exchanges regarding specific subject areas), I would prefer creating another Google group. Then we could have an overview page on the wiki linking to all Google groups belonging to openmod. With archives being public, it is also possible to occasionally read what's happening in other groups if you don't want to be subscribed yourself.
  • As for Gitter, I think that is really complementary to what we have already (chat vs. forum/mailinglist are really different things), and it looks super easy to set up. If you already have a Github account, you don't even need to remember new login credentials. So I think that is a perfect addition to our communication tools.

So, as a bottom line, my suggestion would be to create a Gitter channel connected to the the openmod-initiative Github space, and use that for ad-hoc communication about consolidating workshop results etc., and use this very mailing list for the remainder. As you saw in my other email from today, this list is going to become public, so a big drawback in terms of open communication is soon to be gone. If need be, we can always create separate Google groups for more subject specific discussion groups. But for now, I would keep the number of platforms used in parallel as small as possible.

Thanks again for raising this discussion!

cheers
Ingmar

Ps.: Somewhere in this thread it was suggested that we switch to a MediaWiki based wiki. In fact our wiki is already based on MediaWiki, and even has the excellent Semantic MediaWiki extension installed, which offers enormous capabilities. Our model fact sheet database on the wiki (http://wiki.openmod-initiative.org/wiki/Open_Models) makes use of that functionality. So in my eyes, the wiki has a lot of potential that we don't yet fully exploit. It would in my eyes be the ideal place to consolidate workshop results into (just needs someone doing it - so maybe we need break out group leaders to feel more responsibility for the post-workshop consolidation).



Am 16.11.16 um 14:24 schrieb Robbie Morrison:

Bryn Pickering

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Nov 20, 2016, 1:18:27 PM11/20/16
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Agreed that scattering information is problematic, particularly then finding where a piece of information was given within the myriad of platforms being used.

The example Robbie gave regarding his experience with GLPK is the linked to the reason why we started this discussion, really. There's lots of information from the workshops that needs to be set in stone on the wiki so that it isn't just all lost! This is true not only for the workshops, but also this forum, github activities and any other platforms people are using. Chat might help with that, or it might add another avenue to track for information collation... I'd like to think it would help.

Agreed that both Gitter and Discourse look good.

  • As you say Ingmar, Discourse would likely be a direct replacement for the current Google Group. It does have a range of plugins which could push it to being more beneficial than the current Google Group, as well as getting us away from the closed nature of the platform and better integrating a forum with the openmod website. Financially, self-hosting it on a server within the openmod community would make most sense, you could probably just about do it with a raspberry pi even... Perhaps a topic of discussion for the next workshop?
  • Gitter might be our best bet for the time being, to test out the use of chat in the community. It would likely increase the use of the openmod GitHub too, which is no bad thing. Gitter doesn't allow you to set up a community with the same name as an organisation/repository unless you own it/are an admin on it. I'd be happy to set up gitter.im/openmod-initiative if I could get admin access to the openmod GitHub organisation.

Best,

Bryn

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Robbie Morrison
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Phone: +49.30.612-87617

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Robbie Morrison

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Nov 20, 2016, 5:11:50 PM11/20/16
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Hello all

Additional mailing lists versus web-based forums: I wonder whether setting up additional mailing lists might not be better handled by a feature-rich web-based forum server like Discourse with custom tagging and sophisticated searching and so forth. My instinct is that people will naturally migrate to where the action is (given that there is action) and that the barriers to participation, like the need for an additional account, are not particularly high. As I indicated earlier, moving to a web-based forum will probably relegate our existing mailing list to that of an "announce" list — with little or no discussion taking place.

Gitter: Wikipedia reports that Gitter is only free for one chat room and that additional chat rooms require a paid subscription. A single chat room seems like a considerable limitation. Which raises the question of some (modest) fund-raising to obtain a good solution?

Use cases: Some use-cases could help. One I have in mind is to collaboratively author an open access paper reviewing open energy models. Traffic on this topic would be inappropriate for a mailing list but would be facilitated by a dedicated forum or chat room. Development also could be conducted on our wiki talk pages, but that would be rather clumsy in light of the other solutions under discussion.

Wiki software (as an aside): the use of Wikipedia templates like {{nbsp}} and {{cite journal | title = Some title}} give errors. I would particularly like to be able to used the latter (aka Wikimedia Citation Templates). Is there a work-around? Do these templates exist in another namespace perhaps? Are there equivalents?

with best wishes, Robbie

PS: I am pleased that the mailing list is now open.

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Robbie Morrison

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Dec 6, 2016, 2:48:56 PM12/6/16
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Hello all

There is now a temporary wiki page on which to debate discussion servers.

Without second guessing the debate, it seems that three options are likely:

  • establish additional google groups (email lists) to cater for higher volume traffic
  • Discourse, a full-featured internet forum, hosted on an institutional server somewhere
  • Gitter, a chat service allied to GitHub and simple to set up

Please add technical points to the main page and opinions to the discussion page. In particular, please indicate if your institution would host software (I know my old institution would have done so).

best wishes, Robbie


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